Guest Blog: IVO

How do you feel about transparency? Crucial for democracy to work? And how do you feel about surveillance? Crucial to keep democracies safe?

We started making this show after conversations about the Internet, and how we felt about knowing our online selves could be watched. Not good, was the answer, but to me that always felt pretty distant. I don’t feel like I’m a target of interest to the security services.

But what if you are? And how do you become of interest? You and your behaviour could change, or your government and its priorities could change.

We knew we wanted to make a show that closed the distance on Snowden’s revelations. But who are the people that show should be about? One answer would be, all of us. Mass surveillance relates to all of us. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that surveillance may be distant for me, but it’s not for everybody. As Nadia Latif and Omar El Khoury pointed out in this article, we’re all creating work in the context of Prevent. And we’re all creating work in the context of Tempora.

So we’ve created characters that we hope start to unpack the relationships around surveillance. Come and tell us how we did.